Google’s popular feature hit by another anti-monopoly complaint | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Google has come a long way since Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched it in 1998 as a new search engine to compete with Yahoo, AltaVista, and WebCrawler, among others.

In just four to six years, Google managed to position itself as the top search engine. Its quick success in those first years is often attributed to its speed, much deeper index, query-specific snippets, and relevance of results.

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Even today, despite the existence of AI and many alternative search engines, Google processes around 16.4 billion searches every day, or 189,815 searches per second.

As of March 2025, Google accounted for 79.1% of the global online search engine market on desktop devices.

The company grew to become more than a search engine service provider, offering more than 800 products and services, according to the reports. These include popular products like Gmail and YouTube, and even hardware like Pixel phones and Chromebooks.

Like the majority of technology companies, Google has focused on AI over the last couple of years.

Earlier this year, it released an app that enables users to run various openly available AI models from the AI dev platform Hugging Face on their phones. It also offers access to Google’s popular and powerful Gemma 3n AI model.

Google is accused of violating antitrust laws.

Image source&colon; Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Controversy surrounds Google’s AI Overview

Competition in the AI world is heating up. About two-thirds of the planet’s population uses AI every day, according to a KPMG global study. What’s more, 83% believe using AI offers a wide range of benefits.

Now, when you google something, you are first offered an AI-powered summary “at the top of Google Search results, aiming to provide users with quick, concise answers to their queries by synthesizing information from multiple web sources,” according to AI Overview itself.

AI summaries were first presented as part of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) in May 2024. One year later, the rebranded feature AI Overviews launched in the United States.

This was Google’s strategic move to compete with AI giants such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity AI, DeepSeek, and more.

In October 2024, Google extended the feature globally, launching it across more than 100 countries.

However, in February 2025, Chegg Inc (CHGG) , an education technology company, sued Alphabet over the AI Overviews, arguing the feature violated antitrust laws.

The complaint argues that due to the features’ direct answers to users’ queries without directing them to external websites, Chegg’s platform significantly lost traffic and saw declining revenues. Chegg even announced it is considering privatization or acquisition to deal with the challenges.

The lawsuit might be the first case of a single company accusing Google of violating antitrust law through AI overviews, reported Reuters.

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“Our lawsuit is about more than Chegg – it’s about the digital publishing industry, the future of internet search, and about students losing access to quality, step-by-step learning in favor of low-quality, unverified AI summaries,” Chegg’s CEO Nathan Schultz said.

Now, Chegg is not alone in its anti-monopoly complaints against Google.

Independent publishers file another antitrust complaint over AI Overviews

A group of independent publishers filed an EU antitrust complaint against Google over its AI Overviews. The group also requested an interim action to stop irreparable harm to them, writes Reuters.

“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers, in the form of traffic, readership, and revenue loss,” The Independent Publishers Alliance wrote in the document.

Publishers further argue that they can’t stop Google’s AI from using their material for its summaries without being eliminated in Google’s general search results page.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority confirmed receipt of the complaint.

A Google spokesperson commented, saying its AI experience allows more questions and therefore provides more opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered. They added that sites gain and lose traffic for various reasons.

According to its website, the nonprofit Independent Publishers Alliance advocates for independent publishers. Others who signed the complaint include the nonprofit Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company and The Movement for an Open Web.

Foxglove Co-executive Director Rosa Curlin sounded the alarm on the “existential threat” to journalists and publishers posed by Google’s AI Overviews.

In the end, however, it looks like Google’s AI Overview is heading for self-destruction. As it slowly eliminates competition on which it is directly dependent (for AI-generated summaries), it will be left with no quality resources to maintain itself.